Welcome to Prognosis. I'm Laura Carlson. It's day fifty four since coronavirus was declared a global pandemic. Our main story. Healthcare professionals are hailed as heroes for treating patients on the front lines of a global crisis, but they're facing a crisis of their own. The outbreak is straining their mental health with tragic consequences. But first, here's what happened today.
Federal health regulators said they would tighten oversight of antibody tests that can tell whether patients have been infected with the new coronavirus. The Food and Drug Administration said today that the makers of the test would have to apply for authorization within ten days of putting products on the market. Since mid March, the FDA had been allowing them to
sell the tests without any government sign off. The f d A had originally relaxed its rules to give drug makers flexibility to get the tests to market faster, but some manufacturers allegedly made false or inappropriate claims, and the accuracy of some tests was questioned. The FDA has given emergency authorizations to twelve antibody tests and said that two
hundred are currently in the review process. Meanwhile, the COVID nineteen treatment, remdesvie, is moving quickly through the drug pipeline. The anti viral drug was approved for emergency youth last Friday, and Gill Lead Sciences, the maker of the drug, says it plans to get it to patients as soon as this week. Early results from an ongoing study show remdesvie
reduced the time it took hospitalized COVID nineteen patients to recover. However, the journal The Lancet published results of the same week from a small Chinese study that showed less promising results. Even though the tests and treatments the FDA is fast tracking have yet to even begin containing COVID nineteen, many places have already begun restarting business. That's true of companies too. Carnival Cruise Lines plans to sail ships again on August one.
It's the first major cruise operator in the Americas to talk about reopening coronavirus outbreaks spread widely on several cruise ships earlier this year. The first cruises will set sail from Galveston, Texas, Miami, and Port Canaveral, Florida. Other cruises have been canceled through August thirty one or longer. It's unclear who will sail or how safe it would be to cruise with the virus still likely to be at large. When the industry shutdown had been March, outbreaks at sea
had reached havoc. The confined spaces are a perfect vehicle for the virus to spread, and passengers were trapped aboard, some of whom died and now our main story in hospitals, healthcare workers are under threat from more than just the coronavirus itself. The mental health effects of the work are grave. Recently, the head of emergency medicine at a New York area
hospital died by suicide. Doctors and nurses fighting COVID nineteen are watching patients die at rates rarely seen in civilian medicine, and they're delivering the news to family members who aren't allowed inside the hospital for fear of spreading the disease. Hospitals are trying to treat the minds and hearts of the healers, offering counseling, crisis hotlines and therapy dogs. I talked to Bloomberg's and a court about the scars. The pandemic is leaving on hospital workers and what the health
care system can do about it. These people are going to work every day, you know. First of all, they're actually leaving to go to work, unlike a lot of people who are lucky enough to stay home. UM. And then they're really in sort of the center, the epicenter of this of this pandemic right there, seeing a tremendous
amount of human pain and grief. And they're also bearing the burden not just of treating a disease that we do not really understand, but they're also bearing the burden of knowing that they're kind of the soul, you know, representative of the patient. In this environment, people can't come in and see their family members because of how infectious
this diseases are. Hospitals or other organizations, or even perhaps some healthcare workers themselves, are they spearheading efforts to provide say, more formal resources to two doctors or their other health care colleagues to say, um, cope with this kind of stress. So we spoke with a couple of different institutions that
we're trying to offer better support to their providers. One of them was Mount Sinai here in New York, setting up a center to to screen and treat and study their healthcare workers, you know, difficult experiences through this UM. I spoke with Julie Beavers, who's a trauma and crisis chaplain who flew out here to New York from California to be a support and a resource and health counsel healthcare providers here on the front lines in New York.
People are traumatized and also the healthcare workers are traumatized. This is not normal. This is not their normal. You know, put on your scribs and go to work. UM. When they go to work, they have more people to care for than might be humanly possible, right, and it's in situations that will not make sense to the training that they've had. Yes, they are experts and caring for people, and they know how to run ventilators, and they know how to you know, administer medications, and they know how
to listen to people. These are ends. These nurses aren't necessarily trained to deliver death notifications, right. There's an art to that, and they're not trained for that, right. They're not used to UM dealing with you know, very critical patients and hearing the patient's phone ring. You know, these patients might have been just on the phone with their family members three hours ago and able to talk, and now they're on a ventilator and they may lose their
life by the end of the day. And the nurses are answering some of these phone calls and um, you know that's not part of their training, right, an important thing to think about in an availability of all these resources. Healthcare workers have so much going on at work right now. They're working incredibly long shifts. They don't have a lot of free time, and they're sad and they're scared, and they go home and all they have time to do
is really eat and sleep. Right, And now we're saying in your free time you need to you know, talk to counselor about this. Now that that's something that I think would be challenging for anyone. But I also spoke with a lot of experts who said, you know, there's an additional kind of culture here in the in the medical field, and especially I think among physicians, of you know, we are the helpers, right, We don't need to help,
we help other people. For a lot of them, it can be easy to say, you know, I'm fine, I'm doing fine. You know, I have my friends, I have my family. I talked to other doctors about this. I'm fine, but you know, there's a real concern that if healthcare providers don't take advantage of these resources or don't seek support in some way, that there will be kind of
long lasting scars. It's almost inevitable. I think if you think about this, the scale of this pandemic and the scale of human suffering that healthcare providers are seeing on the job every day. I was thing we might dig into Julie Beaver's story a little bit more um because, as you mentioned, she had recently arrived in New York.
She's working as a chaplain, and I was hoping you might, you know, give us a bit of a like a pain as a picture essentially of how she has been um engaging with healthcare workers and you know, some of the things that she's seen in her her daily experience working as a chaplain with doctors or other workers either
experiencing burnout or just this kind of incredible pressures. Julie Beaver's normally lives, you know, out in California and Sacramento, and she flew um here to New York to volunteer kind of to help frontline healthcare workers with exactly some of the things we've been talking about here, right, with the sort of trauma and the difficulty of this job.
And you know, something that is really interesting about her experience is she's living in one of these hotels that there's a lot of healthcare workers living in these hotels kind of being busted over to the hospitals that they're working at, you know, each day. And so she really structures her day around when the health care providers are, you know, leaving for the day for the day shift and coming back from an evening shift, just sort of saying, hey, I'm here for you. I'm here for you. You can
talk to me. Here's my card. I want to set them up for success going forward. Um. You know, it's very common for them to have nightmares. It's very common for them to you know, go back to their room and spend the day rehashing their shift instead of sleeping. Right. Um. The thing that makes this so much like war is
that this isn't a one time trauma for them. You know, It's not like somebody that has experienced finding a loved one, you know, that has died by suicide in their home or something like that where it's a one time, very traumatic event. These healthcare workers are experiencing traumatic events throughout their twelve hour shift, and and they come back and they try to get some sleep, and then they gear up and go again and again and again and again.
That was Bloomberg's and the Court, and that's our show today. For coverage of the outbreak from one and twenty bureaus around the world, visit bloomberg dot com slash Coronavirus and if you like the show, please leave us a review and a rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It's the best way to help more listeners find our global reporting. The Prognosis Daily edition is hosted by Me Laura Carlson. The show was produced by Me top foreheads, Jordan Gospore
and Magnus Hendrickson. Today's main story was reported by Emma Court. Original music by Leo Sidran. Our editors are Francesco Leavi and Rick Shawine. Francesca Levi is Bloomberg's head of Podcasts. Thanks for listening.